Sphinx

Reasons why the department really should be paying the fees for my online jazz composition course, #47… I’ve commented before that we teachers in higher education have to be very, very careful about extrapolating from our own experience as students; leaving aside the extent to which very many things have changed in the decades since we were undergraduates, most of us were extremely atypical, and what suited us may not be remotely useful for the majority of those we are now teaching. My class yesterday evening emphasised the corollary of this: most of us lack any experience whatsoever of something that is absolutely central to the difficulties experienced by the students who need help and support the most: the feeling of being completely crap and useless.

It’s not that we have always been wonderful at everything, but at a guess the failures were a long time ago, we dropped those subjects at the earliest possible opportunity, and probably in most cases the psychological trauma was created by being unexpectedly average rather than actually rubbish – having to accept the superiority of some other people, not of the entire class. But take the memory of that failure, ditch the usual “oh I was always rubbish at maths/science/woodwork” deflection chuckle, and imagine that this is happening in a subject you have chosen and really want to do well in; not imposter syndrome, but clear proof that you don’t belong, and not for a high-powered academic career but for being at university at all.

My experience yesterday was utterly trivial in comparison – this is just a hobby, with nothing at stake for my future prospects – but still a glimpse into what it must be like for some of our students. Look, I know my homework exercise is hopeless, so can’t we just skip it – give me a zero and move on, rather than discussing it in class? We’re out of time, we’ve made it to the end before my turn came up, I’ve got away with it… and the tutor decides to carry on until he’s dealt with everyone. (Bloody Zoom; couldn’t do that in a normal class with the next lot of people waiting to use the room… and I hope his partner gave him MASSIVE grief for being late for dinner…). I seriously started thinking about staging a broadband problem, or just quietly logging out.

I should stress that I can’t fault the tutor for any of this. The feedback process might well have been less painful if I hadn’t been able to see exactly what he was doing, because it’s exactly what I would be doing myself: the ‘feedback sandwich’, finding vaguely positive things to say as a sugar coating for the devastating bits; trying to put the devastating bits in a constructive forward-looking form; phrasing the same point in several different ways; giving lots of practical advice about how to fix things or do them differently rather than just making abstract comments AND NONE OF THIS HELPS because I know it’s rubbish, I see through all the transparent attempts at making me feel better, and the practical advice is useless because I don’t want to try and improve this mess, I want to forget all about it and start again from scratch in the hope it will be better next time…

I know in theory why the students who most need to talk through the feedback on their work are the ones least likely to take up opportunities to do this; I haven’t felt it before. Maybe the strategies are less obvious and so more effective with students who don’t do feedback professionally – but it’s not just about rational calculation, it’s about the emotions, and I now completely get the sense that, yes, I could learn something from this process, but it’s not enough to outweigh the misery involved in getting there.

Okay, so what does work? At this point we’re back at the issue that I am unlikely to be typical – and in particular, that I have already learnt how to learn (and so a major issue with the jazz is that I simply can’t spare the time to put in serious work getting to grips with this stuff, which is what I would be doing if it actually mattered). Feedback is one of the ways we try to teach students how to learn and improve their work, so what do we do when the feedback process is part of the problem?

This is all very provisional, therefore, but for a start: worked examples. Seeing someone else’s homework being examined can be really helpful – no, not the one who took the instruction ‘write a tune based on a mode’ as the basis for an elaborate multi-part exploration of an Abyssinian scale in 9/4 with percussion and string section*, but something a little more normal (in 3/4, say. Was I the only person who stuck to 4/4? I am just so square…). Even better: worked examples of real actual publications – but ideally ones where the gap between them and what students might imagine themselves capable of isn’t too great. Yes, we can analyse some horribly complex bit of Kenny Wheeler or John Henderson to work out what’s going on, and that has its uses – but it’s not going to help anyone with their own writing until they’re at a very advanced level.

The other thing that comes immediately to mind is privacy; I would certainly have been less uncomfortable having my composition taken apart if it were not happening in front of the rest of the group. Yes, I can see how it could be useful to them, precisely because my approach was relatively unambitious and so the lessons of its flaws more widely applicable, where issues with a piece based on a John Zorn scale in 5/4 might be sui generis and/or simply attributed to over-ambition. But it’s not fair to me… Okay, problem in getting students to engage with personal debriefing sessions, as noted above, and time implications if they all suddenly decided to – but THE thing we have to avoid is public humiliation. Yes, it is a spur to try to do less badly for next time, but I can see how it could easily become a reason not to go back…

* Some interesting lessons about class dynamics, and the roles adopted by different students, too. I sincerely hope I was never ‘that guy’, even in classes when I knew what I was talking about. In this one, I think I’m rapidly turning into a cross between the class clown and the one who asks questions that are transparently intended to divert the conversation. Still it is not bad acktually as during a bit of parsing or drawing a map of Spane you can just look up and sa. ‘Did you hav a tomy gun during the war sir?’…